Tag: What fourth wall

Once you’re set on colleges, take a look at their deadlines and start registering for the mandated exams. The General GRE is pretty much a standard for all STEM courses. Business and management courses will need GMAT. Specialized courses like pure sciences, literature and mathematics might need a subject GRE but few universities have begun phasing them out recently. Except very few cases, which differ with each college, you will almost certainly need to take a language test, either TOEFL or IELTS. Go figure.

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So last week my visa finally came in and in another five weeks, I am out of the country for a minimum of two years. This time last year, I was clueless. I was taking online courses on computational fluid dynamics in hopes of landing a job as an aerospace engineer. Now I’m a month away from starting my master’s degree in physics. What happened? Either the best or the stupidest decision of my life, that’s what happened. (more…)

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Who’s happy?
The optimist is overfed on disappointment,
no outcome’s ever up to the mark of his imagination.
The pessimist walks away with his coin still in the air,
the odds are fifty-fifty, but who’s got time to care?
The realist is drenched in sweat for he knows he can never really know,
until the result is out but by then what’s the point anymore.

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Captain Marvel is right up there with some of the phase one origin stories of Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. When the world was a much simpler place and superheroes were still not so established. But its placement after Infinity War and so close to Endgame makes its stakes feel rather insignificant. Ant-man and Wasp came right after Infinity war as well but that had lovable returning characters whose situation we were worried about during the events of Infinity war. Captain Marvel is a brand new character we’re supposed to get to know now so that her presence in Endgame makes sense – she doesn’t enjoy the popularity of Spiderman who could be directly thrust into Civil War after 10 minutes of chatting with Tony Stark. While it is a great story and a wonderful piece of cinema, the cinematic universe format that Marvel has carved for itself has ended up pushing it into the shadow of the looming threats of Endgame.

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We are so used to watching the hero and villain duke it out on screen and cheering for CSK vs RCB on twitter that we have developed no other means of conflict resolution whatsoever. We are so used to being just the audience to performances that we view even war through the same goggles. The movie ends, the match gets over and the participants and the audience return to their normal lives. War is no movie and we are no mere audience in this scenario.

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I did not notice the fish tank in the background until much later when I was going through the photos we took that night and this was inadvertently caught in one corner. The absurdity initially did make me chuckle as I thought to myself what the fish must feel like stuck behind a glass pane and having to watch other dead fish day in and day out. Is it sad? Is it glad that no one’s killed it yet? However, the current scene in India with the back and forth strikes at the Line of control and the whole country praising war through memes on social media (So much 21st century in one sentence, amirite?), it got me thinking – We are all that fish silently watching other fish die from behind glass panes we so conveniently carry in our palms.

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The question of whether God exists – if there is a supreme consciousness behind the cosmos – primarily belongs to the collective realm of human thought and is in no way exclusive to religion. Early man looking at the stars, modern physicists working on the unified field theory and your best friend with their eyes closed right before taking an exam are all, in one way or the other, trying to figure out God. One uses thought and inquisition, or philosophy, one uses sequential logic and tangible data, or science and one uses faith and will, or religion. There are countless such ways to ponder over this very fundamental question of what was there before everything and man vehemently continues to do so using every tool at his disposal with philosophy, religion and science being the most prominent. At least, most men are. The pioneers of religion – one of the most subjective of these tools, seem extremely content with their answers in spite of having multiple contradicting theories and have deemed this search complete. They seem to be quite impatient people who do not want to wait for the others to catch up but rather want them to quit their pursuits as well since after all, the answer is already here. While God may or may not exist, organised religion most definitely does. Making things worse, it’s infiltrating the ranks of government and things are not going so well.

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“Of all the things in the whole world, only photographs have the power to stop time,” says Ram, quite aptly named – for Lord Ram is the trademark of fidelity – who leads life as a travel photographer and mentor. A profession that lets him stay untethered and be constantly on the move while simultaneously allowing him to freeze any moment he deems worthy on celluloid. The juxtaposition of ‘fleeting moments’ and ‘memories that stand still in time’ follow us throughout the movie: while the characters are physically always on the move – in cars, on late night walks on empty roads and in the metro – their conversation and the heart of the story is all about their past love which will always stay unmoving and unchanging two decades behind in time.

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“Your time has finally come, my boy.” Pomeron’s mother, Eve – a woman five-and-two years old, and hunchbacked – said, reaching to put a garland around his neck. An already short women, with a hunch nonetheless, reaching the staggeringly tall Pom’s head was no small feat.

Pom bowed low to make it easy for her. She was beaming with pride. “I wish your father was here. He would’ve been so happy to see you carrying on his own work. My boy, a Hero.” she said and sobbed into her dress.